And so, to kill some time between now and Tuesday, and to get a post in for the month of October, I’ll cobble together a personal, far from comprehensive, somewhat belated roundup of Russian news.

In late July one of my brothers gave me a T-shirt, for no reason other than the fact it had Russian writing on it and he figured I might like it. I do like it, but as luck would have it, I couldn’t wear it for a while.

It says, “Kiss me, I’m Russian!” (In the States, anyway, you come across such stuff all the time—“Kiss me, I’m Italian,” “Kiss me, I’m Lithuanian,” etc., etc.) Just the thing to wear during my bicycle commute, since my other T-shirts are getting ratty. Unfortunately, in August the Russians invaded Georgia, and my commute takes me past the Russian embassy, where the Georgians picketed for several weeks: “Russian tanks … out of Georgia” was the chant I heard the most as I pedaled by. I resisted the urge to congratulate them on having a president who is just about as reckless as ours. Speaking of whom, how could a person not laugh when George W. Bush, with no trace of irony (of course), criticized Russia’s “bullying and intimidation.” He said “Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.”

The Russia bashing started in earnest, as prescribed by our fetid foreign policy conventional wisdom—even Barack Obama felt the need to join in, unfortunately. One could find scattered attempts in the US press to put the conflict in context, but the tenor of the coverage was Cold War redux. Here are a few pieces I found evenhanded or sympathetic (gasp!) to the Russian point of view:

• Mikhail Gorbachev: Russia Never Wanted a War
• Fred Kaplan on the “feckless response” of the US to the Russian invasion of Georgia
• Glenn Greenwald on being smeared for not toeing the line on the Russia–Georgia conflict
• The Nation: The Cold War That Wasn’t

Earlier in the month, a giant of Russian letters passed away. I would be remiss if I didn’t note, however briefly, the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

As I was coming of age in the 1970s and became infatuated with Russian literature and, soon after, the Russian language, the figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sure to appeal to an American teenager, especially during a time of protest against the Vietnam War, racial inequality, and a tight-ass culture. Here was a guy who was butting heads with the Soviet state. Brezhnev was sort of like their Nixon. The reasoning was pretty clear, if juvenile. A trace of my Solzhenitsyn craze can be found in the St. Joseph High School yearbook for 1972: at the back, a donation in the name of Oleg Kostoglotov, the main character in Cancer Ward. (I leave it to the devoted reader to say whether the 54-year-old is any less pretentious than the 18-year-old.)

After the Soviet Union dissolved, Aleksandr Isayevich turned his withering gaze on the West, with its liberal mores and diverse ways of living. It became clear that Solzhenitsyn was in fact a Russian nationalist and theocrat of the Dostoevsky mold—and a monarchist to boot. Whatever relevance he had to Russian public life seemed to fade with each passing year, even after he moved back home, eventually taking up residence in a dacha outside Moscow (between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko).

Whether or not he ever regains the stature he enjoyed for several decades, he had a big impact on me. And I often think of his breakthrough work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—not the descriptions of the grim conditions of the labor camp, or the political discussions among the zeks. It’s the fact that Ivan Denisovich wakes up feverish and achy but decides to work rather than spend the day in bed in the infirmary. And that night he concludes he made the right decision—he feels better, he ate better (he wouldn’t have gotten his full ration in the infirmary), and he accomplished something. It felt good to work, even on behalf of the Gulag and the Soviet state. The opening page and the closing page—for whatever reason, they stuck.

Time to lighten up a bit. Only recently I discovered you can select a “country content preference” in YouTube, and naturally I selected Russia. Almost immediately I found a video that played off the famous “Where the Hell is Matt?” video, only in this case Matvei does his “dance” in all the stations of the Moscow Metro.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was glad to have the opportunity to “revisit” the three or four I saw in person, and to get acquainted with the rest. The Russian guy starts off doing the exact same goofy dance that Matt does, but in what I would say is typical Russian fashion, he varies it occasionally—out of boredom, or to stave off anticipated boredom in the viewer, or both. In some ways it’s a more artistic product, but it is long; and, as different as the Metro stations are, they aren’t as varied as the locales in Matt’s video. But I like it, and tip my hat to him.

Translation of the introduction:

It took 27 hours to film this video. It took 7 hours to edit it. We visited all the stations marked on the map of the Moscow Metro. At each one, the same dance was performed.* About 300 people witnessed the dance in person.

At the end:

Thank you, Homepage.ru, for the jersey and the fares.

In the YouTube “more info” area for this video, it says further:

Для полных идиотов, без обоих полушарий головного мозга – это видео – стеб над оригинальным роликом танцующего Мэтта. Если вы этого не поняли и пишите, про какой-то плагиат – ВЫ ИДИОТ. [For complete idiots, lacking both hemispheres of the brain: this video is a send-up of the original film of the dancing Matt. If you don't get it and write that this is some sort of plagiarism—YOU'RE AN IDIOT.]

Among many nice touches: at the Lubyanka station, he dances in front of the police booth.

And now that I’ve discovered Homepage.ru, I’ve learned that they have discovered Halloween.

Addendum 2008.11.08: The New York Times has published an excellent piece, “Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question,” based on accounts by international monitors—members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (OSCE is a multilateral organization with 56 member states that has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s, according to the Times.) See also this piece about the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev (“perhaps the world’s most famous Ossetian”) and the heat he took for defending Russia at the time.
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*Not quite true, as noted above.

I also learned that the Russian word for “making a reservation” is the same as the word for “adding armor to”—бронирование [bronirovaniye]. I guess it means you’re protecting your room from anyone else using it. It sure looks odd, though. You can do the same with airline tickets.

But hey, why guess? One Russian-English/English-Russian dictionary (Kenneth Katzner’s, published by Wiley) has separate entries for the two senses (armoring/reserving), with the stress in different places.* The online version of the Ushakov Russian dictionary, on the other hand, provides the two senses under one entry and gives no guidance on stress (but seems to imply the stress is the same). The second definition given is: Особым распоряжением выделить (выделять) что-н. (какие-н. предметы общего пользования) для какой-н. цели, делая неприкосновенным (нов.) [Set something (or some objects of general use) apart by special arrangement for a certain purpose, making it inviolable]. (Inviolable? That’s what the dictionaries say, but I’d go with the root [not touchable] and say inaccessible). The tag “нов.” implies this usage is recent, but it’s strange: Wiley’s dictionary was published in 1984 and has it; the electronic dictionary I have installed on my computer (and paid good money for a few years ago) doesn’t.

Not that I’m going to be making a reservation at the Hotel Brothers Karamazov any time soon. Online daydreaming—that’s all it is.
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*The Wiley dictionary seems to say we’re dealing with two different words, and that got me thinking that the true root of the word meaning “make a reservation” might come from a foreign language. This happens a lot in Russian: кокетничать from coquette, импровизировать from improvise, etc. But I couldn’t find anything in French or German that would fit the bill.

If I have read any Ricoeur, it would have been at the behest of my friend Tom F.–H., who most likely had shoved one of great man’s papers at me during one of our frequent leisurely coffee breaks at the Newberry Library. It was my first job after leaving the university— “collating” rare editions of English literature before they were photographed for microfiche publication. Aside from reading a few first editions in the Rare Book Room and learning what “foxing” is, the coffee breaks were the highlight of the job. Tom’s wife worked for the university’s continuing education division, and somehow or other she and Tom had dealings with Ricoeur (who taught at the U of C from 1971 to 1991). Tom was nuts for the guy.

If I have read Ricoeur, I have certainly forgotten it. Reading the titles of his books in the obit, I wonder why I never gave him a shot:

• The Living Metaphor (1975)
• Time and Narrative (3 vols, 1983–1985)
• Oneself as Another (1990)
• Tolerance between Intolerance and the Intolerable (1996)
• What Makes Us Think (1998)
• Memory, History, Forgetting (2000)

So tempting … Well, it’s never too late.

But here’s the point. A colleague of his, André LaCocque, was quoted:

One of the most penetrating statements of Paul Ricoeur says, “Justice proceeds by conceptual reduction; love proceeds by poetic amplification.” Justice and love summarize, in my mind, the man Ricoeur.

We chewed that one over, Laura and I, one morning before I pedaled off to work. What does it mean? Of course it’s out of context, but still—there’s something there. It made sense to me: justice seems to require that we make distinctions and hierarchies, while love seeks to dissolve differences and create the sense of the One. Laura wondered whether love must precede justice. Today everyone is obsessed with justice, she said. Without love, there is no justice. (I think she said that, or something like it.)

This made me think of a section in The Brothers Karamazov (the reader may wish to be excused at this point). The first time I read the book, I slogged through that part. The next few times, I ran past it, knowing what great stuff lay ahead (murder, mayhem, the Grand Inquisitor …). The last time, however, I paid a bit of attention to it.

In chapter 5 of Book II (Part I), two of the brothers (Alyosha and Ivan) and their father are killing time in Father Zosima’s cell, waiting for Dmitry to show up so they could discuss their family feud and seek advice. Father Joseph, the librarian, had learned that Ivan was the author of a journal article on the question of a theoretical ecclesiastical-civil court, and was pleased to discuss the topic with him.

The question is not entirely theoretical in some countries today, and there is a chance that Iraq will have something of the sort, when all is said in done. I’m not an expert in Islamic justice, so I don’t know what role love might play in it. Love was certainly an integral part of the system Ivan had argued for (ironically or not), at least in Zosima’s rendering of it—the Church acts as a “tender, loving mother.” This question sent me off looking for information on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s views on the kind of judicial system is best suited for Russia (I had recalled the accusations that he wanted to institute a “theocracy,” but it seems the charges may have been exaggerated). I wondered if Solzhenitsyn’s blueprint would look at all like Ivan Karamazov’s.

To an American eye, such schemes are risky. Much of our governance is based on the assumption that human beings are subject to both inadvertant error and selfish cupidity. In performing our official duties we can certainly exhibit disinterested competence, even perform a noble deed or two, but shitty acts are not beyond us, either. So we built (and build) structures of words—laws and regulations—and things—penalties and prisons, and we’ve added mechanisms for redress, because mistakes will be made. There doesn’t seem to be an ounce of love in it. But does it work well enough? Is it the best we can hope for? Maybe, but no one in their right mind would want to be drawn into it. Every once in a while, a lawsuit will accomplish something great, for an individual or for society. More often than not, despite all its fine distinctions and subtle argumentation, it’s a rather blunt instrument.

But when we talk about “justice,” that can’t be all we mean by it—codices and incarceration. Justice is more than the judicial system, isn’t it? In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitry ended up being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, yet he felt justice was done; and his brother Ivan went off his cork over the question of whether he shared in the guilt of his father’s murder.

Maybe I’ll track down Paul Ricoeur’s 1996 opus. Tableau said it’s about justice, and I obviously need some help.

It should be apparent that this is an homage à Dostoïevski,* a nod to his Записки из подполья, usually rendered in English as Notes from Underground (or even less faithfully as Notes from the Underground). Some commentators have offered alternative renderings of подполье, without going to far as to recommend its use in the translated title. For instance, some have noted that the word literally means “under the floor,” and have suggested that Dostoevsky meant to conjure the image “beneath the floorboards” (especially since his “hero” likens himself to a mouse at one point).

Naturally at moments like this one turns to V.I. Dahl [Даль], the great Russian lexicographer. He defines подполье as “простор или яма под полом; у крест. это род чулана или погребка, либо с западней, либо с ходом через голбец” [a space or hole under the floor; among peasants it is a sort of larder or cellar with either a trapdoor or an entry through a storeroom].

So it seems “cellar” would be the most accurate translation. However, for my purposes it sounds too rustic. (I think of Dorothy struggling to get the door to the cellar open as the tornado bears down on her.) It also makes me think of “notes from the seller.” (Doesn’t everyone think homonymically?)

So “basement” it is, connoting dim light, cobwebs, and perhaps even a mouse or two; a place where a guy can retreat and type a few words into the æther.

This new title should also signal a desire on my part to open a new area of the blog and begin tracking contemporary Russian life.

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*Isn’t that exquisitely pretentious? I couldn’t help myself—I find Dostoevsky’s name such a stitch in French.